Transscalar Critique: Climate, Blackness, Crisis

Contemporary African American writing addresses the twin crises of climate change and anti-Black violence by adopting a transscalar approach, which understands crisis as operating on multiple scales simultaneously. Transscalar Critique argues that literature plays a crucial role in shaping a more sustainable and equitable future by offering a mode of literary criticism that emphasizes the connections between the human and nonhuman worlds.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 31 January 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Contemporary African American writing addresses the intertwined challenges of anthropogenic climate change and anti-Black violence through innovative approaches to scale. By drawing on Black Studies and African American literature, this writing intervenes in humanistic narratives of the Anthropocene, a period marked by human-induced environmental destruction. This comprehensive overview explores the diverse ways in which scale has been taken up in contemporary literary criticism, the environmental humanities, and Black Studies. It brings together public policy and literature to argue for the causal role that literature plays in shaping a more sustainable and equitable future.

The history of the contemporary is characterized by crises, with the twinned crises of environmental destruction and anti-Black violence standing out as particularly significant. Transscalar Critique posits that contemporary Black literature navigates this crisis by adopting a transscalar approach, which recognizes that crises operate on multiple scales simultaneously, ranging from the molecular to the geological, from the economic to the aesthetic. As a result, this book advocates for transscalar critique as a mode of literary criticism.

Organized around specific crises and authors, Transscalar Critique argues that crises provide a lens through which competing analytical, artistic, and planetary frameworks collide. In times of crisis, questions of race, geology, politics, epistemology, and ontology are brought to the forefront in unexpected and revealing ways. Transscalar Critique utilizes the literary, critical, and public policy responses to these events to uncover connections between the human and nonhuman worlds.

By adopting a transscalar perspective, contemporary African American writing contributes to a broader understanding of the complex interrelationships between human societies and the natural world. It challenges traditional narratives that view the environment as separate from social and political issues, highlighting the ways in which environmental degradation and anti-Black violence are interconnected. Through its exploration of scale, Transscalar Critique offers a valuable tool for reimagining our relationship with the environment and for building a more just and sustainable future.

Weight: 494g
Dimension: 240 x 161 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399506465